Wi-Fi Alliance and Wireless Gigabit Alliance To Unify

Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance have executed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlining their plans to consolidate activity in Wi-Fi Alliance. The agreement builds on more than two years of collaboration between the organizations, in which WiGig Alliance developed the groundbreaking WiGig technology specifications including MAC-PHY and Protocol Adaptation Layers (PALs) and Wi-Fi Alliance initiated work to develop an interoperability certification for 60 GHz products.

WiGig technology has continued to gain significant momentum, and will soon bring users closer to a future of truly seamless wireless connectivity complementing the traditional Wi-Fi networking. WiGig offers short-range multi-gigabit connections for applications ranging from high-definition WiGig Display Extensions (WDE), to peripheral connectivity and I/O cable replacement such as WiGig Serial Extension (WSE), WiGig Bus Extension (WBE) and WiGig SDIO Extension (WDS). Early 60 GHz implementations based on the WiGig specifications are entering the market now and ABI Research forecasts that by 2016, annual shipments of devices with both Wi-Fi and WiGig technology will reach 1.8 billion.

“This is an exciting technology, and has been an important highlight of our certification roadmap for some time, so we are delighted to take this step,” said Wi-Fi Alliance president and CEO Edgar Figueroa. “Combining the expertise of Wi-Fi Alliance and WiGig Alliance will deliver a terrific user experience with 60 GHz solutions, and will help ensure that a full range of interoperable WiGig solutions reaches the market as quickly as possible.”